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“I think the first words he said to me were something like, ‘What are we going to do with these scumbags?’”

In the wake of a horrific school shooting, a senior member of the White House appeared ready to take the game industry to task for supposedly desensitizing an entire generation to the horrors of gun violence. But while President Trump has repeatedly called out video games and other violent media in recent weeks, he’s not the one who reportedly called game industry representatives “scumbags” in advance of a White House summit. The above quote is instead attributed to the last senior White House official to host a meeting with the video game industry: Vice President Joe Biden.

Back at the start of 2013, the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School weighed heavily on the nation’s collective consciousness. The shooting killed 20 Connecticut school children on December 14, 2012, and the entire country was looking for somewhere to direct its anger and take action.

A push for gun control was met with an equally vocal push for alternative considerations, and video game violence became a convenient explanation for some, widely discussed as a potential explanation for real-world youth violence. So Vice President Biden, under the direction of President Obama, prepared to meet with representatives from the game industry as part of a wide-ranging gun violence task force.

The White House’s official video release of Vice President Joe Biden’s opening remarks during his video game summit.

The recollections of those who were at that meeting with Biden provide some insight into what is still often a strained relationship between gamemakers and government officials. These memories also highlight how even ostensibly well-meaning government outreach can lead to almost reflexive defensiveness from a wary industry.

“I’ve got to walk you back off this ledge”

Constance Steinkuehler, now professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine, remembers the strain Biden was under leading up to the January 2013 game industry meeting. “By the time I got to [Biden], he had just met with families [of the victims], he was upset, and he was angry,” Steinkuehler told Ars. “[He] was angry and not so keen on the industry at all, I’ve got to be honest.”

Steinkuehler, who served as President Obama’s White House senior policy advisor for digital media in 2011-2012, said the vice president “loves the high-tech job sector [the game industry] creates. I think he and his staff at least walked into the briefing with me with many of the same misconceptions [about video game violence] that are not based on research.” (A representative for the vice president declined a request for comment from Ars Technica.)

As the outgoing senior adviser for digital media at the time, it was Steinkuehler’s job to help organize the White House meeting with the game industry that Biden requested. It was also her job to present him with the existing research on the topic and to convince the vice president that, no, these industry executives were not the “scumbags” that she remembers him saying they were.

"What are we going to do with these scumbags?"
-Professor Constance Steinkuehler, recalling Vice President Joe Biden’s initial thoughts on the game industry

“I’m standing there by myself going, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I’ve got to walk you back off this ledge,’” Steinkuehler says of her first time meeting with Biden to brief him before the roundtable meeting. “And the only way to do this is actually show you the data and show you what the research says. So we sat and debated.”

Further Reading

What was supposed to be a five-minute pre-meeting briefing turned into a 45-minute discussion of all the research that shows playing violent video games doesn’t actually materially lead to more violent outcomes later in life, Steinkuehler says. The vice president went in skeptical, asking questions on everything from the sources of the data to the strength of the statistical correlations to rankings of other effect variables on youth violence, she says. By the end of this briefing, Steinkuehler says she had convinced the vice president that “we have quite a bit of data that shows that this is not a substantive relationship.”

While Steinkuehler “would love to tell you it was my persuasive powers” that won the day, she said it was more that Biden simply kept an open mind toward the data. “He tends to be a person who says, ‘We should not be afraid of facts. Facts are our friends, and you’re on the wrong side of history if you’re on the wrong side of facts,’” she told Ars.

“I really feel like Vice President Biden was drilling in,” recalled Mark DeLoura, a game industry veteran who succeeded Steinkuehler in the White House’s digital media advisor role. DeLoura also attended the meeting between Biden and the game industry. “I don’t think he’s a super big game player, so he was drilling in to learn more.”

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl